Sunday Morning

Note:

This is a post that I started quite a while ago and forgot about, but I didn’t remove the information because I’m still interested in it. If you’re the type of person who doesn’t care about anything older than two days on the internet, then you should probably skip this entry. Or my whole blog, really.

On Sunday mornings, I usually lay in bed reading until mid-afternoon. Since what I read often pertains to my work, I thought I’d start sharing it, if nothing else for my own record should I feel the need to come back to something later. It’s not that different from the process of collecting and responding to information in my sketchbook, except perhaps some limitation on how I can respond, which is mostly self-determined.

This is an unintentionally painter filled post. In the future they’ll be more varied, but I guess I’m focusing on painters right now because I have so many questions about my own paintings. Plus, I just love looking at paintings.

A combination of working in the studio on three new paintings and reading the articles about Julia Schwartz helped me to realize that the way I think about painting — actually, visual storytelling as a whole — is experiencing an editing process where I ask more critically, “Is this necessary?” My impulse has always been to add, add, add, but as I worked (and later read) there was this building sense that what I really needed to do was cut away.

Update: Months later, I had already forgotten this shift, and set myself to other painting problems. (To be fair to my memory, I had stopped painting again for that time.) It was re-opening this draft that reminded me of what I feel was an important moment for me. How it will play out, I’m not sure. That’s what makes it fun, though.

I’m not sure where I came across Simone Pellegrini‘s work. I feel drawn to it similarly to how I feel drawn to Martin Ramirez — in an almost mindlessly magnetic way, that is more pleasurable and internally stirring than thoughtful or verbose. (Though to some extent, all of the above paintings are immediately attractive to me without necessarily knowing why. The attractiveness undulates or altogether flattens and the meaning comes later.)